CBAM in current form has no benefit for European stainless steel industry: CEOs

The European carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) in its current form will not benefit the European stainless steel industry, a panel of executives from European stainless steel producers told delegates at the SMR Stainless Steel conference in Rome on Sept. 17.

"CBAM is a bad instrument, it is wrongly conceived, it is almost impossible to apply, it is limited to the first phase of the [production] cycle [Scope 1], and it's not going to work," Antonio Marcegaglia, CEO of Italian steelmaker Marcegaglia, said. "I do believe it has been used so far as an idea of increasing protectionism rather than balancing efforts as it was originally conceived."

"CBAM has to be enlarged to Scope 3 emissions, otherwise it's completely useless. But this is complex, and complexity means inapplicability and circumvention," Dimitri Menecali, CEO of Italian producer Arvedi AST, added.

Scope 1 refers to a company's direct emissions, Scope 2 includes indirect emissions such as from the generation of purchased electricity, and Scope 3 covers wider indirect emissions including amongst other things business travel and end-of-life treatment of sold products.

The panel of CEOs noted that producers in Asia have a relatively low proportion of stainless steel scrap in their raw materials mix due to supply constraints, leading to high use of carbon-intensive nickel pig iron (NPI), which is also relatively cheap.

Platts assessed nickel pig iron with 10% nickel content at $121.50/mtu FOB Indonesia on Sept.18, unchanged on the day but down from $124/mtu from the start of September.

"If we based our stainless industry on scrap only, we would produce less than 30 million metric tons melting per year [globally], while currently we are around 60 MMt," Markus Moll, CEO of stainless analytics firm SMR said. He noted that while renewable energy investments in China far outstrip those made in Europe, the high use of NPI on Asian stainless producers' carbon footprint was exceptional.

"It is impossible to produce stainless steel purely based on stainless scrap in Asia and there are efforts [to decarbonize] in Asia, but the point is, these efforts are not enough. And certainly these are not the same efforts the European Commission is asking of European producers," Aperam CEO Timoteo Di Maulo said.

"If there is not a level playing field, then European industry will disappear -- CBAM is bad, it's an experiment and no one knows how it will work. We should have something more global across the value chain, including for finished products," Di Maulo added.

"We don't have more than 20-25% scrap in what we are producing [overall]. But today we are importing whatever we are melting for 300-series stainless steel, we are using almost 75% scrap in the raw materials mix there," Ratan Jindal, CEO of Indian producer Jindal Stainless, said. "We are setting up a meltshop in Indonesia [using NPI] with the world's largest stainless steel producer Tsingshan, because the world doesn't have enough scrap, and scrap [exports] from Europe or America could be restricted."

Jindal was referring to the EU's revised Waste Shipment Regulation, which entered into force on May 20, 2024, with rules on exports to be implemented from May 2027. It could restrict scrap metal exports to non-OECD countries such as India, should processing standards not be considered equivalent to EU standards.

"CBAM is an experiment and it started because Europe never wants to go against WTO [World Trade Organization] rules and never wanted to speak about duties," Bernardo Velazquez, CEO of Spanish producer Acerinox, said. He cited two reasons for this reluctance: "Because we are scared of bilateral negotiations -- we are the only big market still defending the WTO, and because we know that the [CBAM] duty is a tax and taxes are a sensitive issue in Europe because every country is sovereign to set their taxes and nobody wanted a war to standardize taxes."

"CBAM maybe can protect the [domestic] European stainless steel industry but we will not be able to export stainless steel out of Europe," Velazquez added.

European stainless steel exports have fallen sharply over the past decade from more than 1.8 MMt in 2012 to just 846,431 metric tons last year, according to European steel producers association Eurofer.